Personality and deception. Are suggestibility, compliance and acquiescence related to socially desirable responding?

The concepts and measurement of suggestibility, compliance and acquiescence are important to the forensic assessment of victims, witnesses and suspects in relation to the ‘reliability of testimony’. In this paper the relationship of these three measures to socially desirable responding is investigated. 102 participants completed the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI), the Gudjonsson Suggestibility (GSS 2) and Compliance (GCS) Scales, a test of acquiescence, and a measure of ‘impression management’ (IM) and ‘self deception enhancement’ (SDE) using the Paulhus Deception Scales. As predicted, neither IM nor SDE correlated significantly with suggestibility, compliance, acquiescence, or IQ. Factor analysis showed that the two deception measures loaded on a separate factor to the other measures. A significant relationship was found between compliance and acquiescence, but multiple regression analysis showed that this was largely mediated by IQ. The findings show that neither GSS 2 nor the GCS are significantly related to socially desirable responding, either in terms of ‘impression management’ or ‘self deception enhancement’.